This Friday, the OGS carried on its schedule at UNC with several new presentations organized throughout the day. On the agenda, a focus on regional assets to implement solutions to environmental and systemic challenges shared by PICTs. More than ever this week, the emphasis was on the importance of collaboration, sharing and creating synergies within the community and between participants working on common issues.
Sharing data and initiatives
This is a point that Jean Massenet – COO at INSIGHT and one of the main co-facilitators this week – reminded the assembly this morning: the OGS is an event based on the values of collaboration, sharing and community. Since Wednesday and the beginning of the technical presentations organized at UNC, participants have benefited from multiple presentations, experience sharing and lessons learned by speakers from the public and private spheres of the Pacific. Today, the OGS went one step further in its desire to build bridges between the region’s key players, with a series of presentations focusing on data management, Open Source & Open Data, and the sources of funding available to Pacific projects.
Frédéric Huynh, Director of Data Terra and among the speakers this Friday morning, told us that “there are many initiatives in PICTs to address the challenges of climate change, systemic adaptation and sustainable growth. We are all aware that it is now essential to share and exchange information on the issues we have in common. This is the purpose of the round tables held this morning: to pool our initiatives, to look for ways of accessing reliable and reproducible data in order to move forward together and, why not, to meet potential funders who might be interested in participating in certain projects”.
Focus on innovation at N Station
The afternoon at UNC ended with a final session of presentations dedicated to various scientific programs created for PICTs and their sources of funding. Speakers from the GEO, the European Union, the AFD, Spatial Days (specialized in GIS) or the Caledonian network GeoDEV RAN took the floor and highlighted the initiatives and devices in place for the region. But that’s not all the OGS had in store for this Friday! At 4.30 pm, the participants of the event were taken to the “Station N” at the entrance of Nouville. They were able to visit this emblematic place of New Caledonian innovation, inaugurated last March and dedicated to the most promising startups of the territory. In addition to this visit, the Station N also hosted the official launch of the seventh edition of the Ocean Hackathon, a competition organized over several days and around collaborative computer programming projects linked to the ocean. The “OH7” was thus integrated into the OGS program and therefore took on a regional dimension. Indeed, the New Caledonian participants were joined by university teams from a dozen islands and territories of the South Pacific.
Tomorrow, the OGS goes “flip flop”!
While the Ocean Hackathon participants will be at the height of their coding exercise, the OGS participants will have the pleasure of spending their Saturday on the mythical Amédée Island. On the agenda, a day of “community-building” which will highlight the incredible biodiversity of a South Pacific island, between turtles and sea snakes. Let’s wear flip flops !
